Story and photograph by Stacey Curry Gunn.
Turning a revenue to assist the planet
Micro hydro innovator GreenBug Power stands alone in North America in repurposing historical expertise for environmentally pleasant energy era, with the potential to show hundreds of small dams which have been ignored for many years into revenue-generating property.
They are saying cash makes the world go spherical.
Entrepreneur Tony Bouk thinks it may possibly additionally assist save the planet. And he’s placing that principle to the check together with his latest enterprise, GreenBug Power Inc.
GreenBug is bringing Twenty first-century disruption to hydropower era by adapting historical expertise – the two,000-year-old Archimedes screw – to generate cost-effective, dependable, inexperienced hydroelectricity from an abundance of long-idle small dams which are in any other case crumbling into spoil on streams and creeks throughout North America.
The idea was born of Bouk’s want to increase his enterprise pursuits to deal with his concern that unchecked human exercise is “threatening our personal existence and the continued existence of each different species on the planet.” After an expertise volunteering with a non-profit environmental group, he had develop into satisfied that the revenue motive was the lacking ingredient for the dimensions of change he envisioned.
Following Ontario’s introduction of the Inexperienced Power Act in 2009, Bouk and enterprise accomplice Brian Weber, co-founders of Bluestreak Gear Inc., determined to analysis alternatives in renewable power.
Bouk’s father, Mike, the previous CEO of Ag Power Co-operative who now serves as president of GreenBug, suggested them to search for their subsequent concept “in their very own yard” – to search out one thing native, one thing “common folks can use.”
Because it turned out, simply past Weber’s yard in Delhi, Ont., a little bit stream meandered over a small irrigation pond dam belonging to the tobacco farmer subsequent door. Bouk and Weber quickly discovered that whereas the panorama of Norfolk County appeared flat, there have been tons of of underused, practically derelict small dams throughout them – infrastructure that had been made irrelevant a century in the past.
On the daybreak of the twentieth century, these dams supplied important energy for the business of the day – serving sawmills, flour mills, woolen mills and the like – solely to be made redundant when the large publicly owned hydroelectric producing stations at Niagara Falls got here on stream within the early 1900s.
A long time later, the dams have develop into a legal responsibility to the municipality, non-public property proprietor, or conservation authority accountable for them.
However the place others see legal responsibility, Bouk and Weber noticed alternative, regardless of a number of challenges to unravel.
The obvious preliminary problem was the dimensions of the dams – their “low heads” – which means a drop of between one and 10 toes – precluded the usage of turbine expertise designed for top stream websites.
Extra analysis led to the Archimedes screw – invented 2,000 years in the past to pump water from one place to a different – usually uphill – and mostly used as we speak in sewage remedy amenities. The screw can be used for energy era, primarily in Europe: water cascading down the helical ridge wrapping across the cylinder shaft gives the mandatory rotational motion. It has the added benefit of permitting small particles – and fish – to move by with out incident.
Bouk and Weber wanted one thing smaller that may work for Ontario’s multitude of dams below 500kW, one thing that wouldn’t freeze and wouldn’t require fixed intervention and upkeep to function. So that they walked out to the tiny dam in Weber’s yard and constructed their first prototype, producing a half a kilowatt of energy, and GreenBug was born.
To additional refine and scale the idea, they turned to the College of Guelph’s Faculty of Engineering and different college analysis companions, with funding from the Nationwide Analysis Council Canada – Industrial Analysis Help Program, and a grant from the Pure Sciences and Engineering Analysis Council of Canada that they used to construct a predictive mannequin to find out the most effective screw dimension for optimum return on funding.
GreenBug additionally grew to become an Innovation Guelph Quick Lane shopper and was launched to mentor Bob Ilmonen, a mechanical engineer with experience in machine design and product improvement, who works extensively within the power sector.
At their first assembly in GreenBug’s tiny workplace in Delhi, Ilmonen requested the questions that led to a listing of greater than a dozen points round enterprise improvement. One level of dialogue – tax legal responsibility – grew to become the main focus of a Quick Lane venture. It was a problem that was “consuming away at us,” Mike Bouk remembers. “We didn’t need to pay tax till the most recent time attainable.” The venture concerned getting recommendation from accounting agency RLB that can considerably scale back GreenBug’s tax invoice within the quick time period – “large cash they will preserve of their pockets and reinvest,” Ilmonen notes.
Ilmonen additionally urged the companions to develop a number of, impartial income streams – quick. “I instructed them: income is your most essential factor proper now; you’ve simply acquired to begin making a buck. If it’s a must to lean out a window and promote ice cream cones for income, that’s what it’s a must to do.
“And that’s what they actually centered on – income, income, income. They centered on simply getting one in every of this stuff put in as a result of it continues to generate income.”
That first venture was at Fletcher’s Horse World close to Waterford, Ontario – the place property proprietor John Fletcher had a crumbling mill constructing and dam on Nanticoke Creek, which final produced electrical energy to run a ginseng operation many a long time in the past.
At Fletcher’s in 2013 GreenBug put in the primary grid-connected Archimedes screw generator (ASG) in North America. Right now the $65,000 venture generates 7.2kW of energy and saves Fletcher round $800 a month on the electrical energy invoice for his horse gross sales and coaching area.
Whereas Fletcher’s GreenBug system is web metered, which means the ability the positioning generates is utilized to cut back his electrical energy invoice, GreenBug can be centered on alternatives created by Ontario’s Feed-in-Tariff (FIT) program for renewable power improvement, which buys electrical energy from permitted initiatives at mounted charges for 40 years.
The corporate has since established partnerships to develop a number of extra micro hydro protects across the province, with one FIT utility permitted for the Delhi Quance Dam – the one FIT contract for hydropower issued within the third spherical of the FIT utility course of.
The Quance Dam FIT venture, a partnership with Norfolk County, is on course for set up this 12 months. The positioning of a lumber and gristmill based in 1842, it’s now a public park and features a fish ladder on the dam, which was rebuilt in 1992. The positioning will retain its roots as an influence supply, producing 53 kW of energy – practically sufficient to energy the native area – whereas additionally serving as a vacationer attraction, notes Mike Bouk.
GreenBug has seven FIT purposes now below evaluation, and continues to face alone as the one firm in North America utilizing Archimedes screw expertise for micro hydropower era.
Their creativity and tenacious downside fixing has been acknowledged with two awards to this point: the 2014 Ontario Waterpower Affiliation Innovation Award and the 2015 3M Environmental Innovation Award for modern contributions to environmental change.
CEO Tony Bouk estimates there are literally thousands of dams in Canada and the U.S. that might return to worthwhile, environmentally pleasant energy era utilizing the GreenBug system.
“The one solution to do it’s to earn money for folks,” he says. “And we all know that each time GreenBug installs a system and we and our companions earn money, there’s that a lot much less carbon produced and fewer greenhouse gases.
“A method we will change the established order proper now’s by profiting from the simple beneficial properties, the low-hanging-fruit alternatives that exist already, and with GreenBug we simply occur to be doing micro hydro as a result of the chance is massive and we expect we will do it higher than it’s ever been executed earlier than.”
About Quick Lane™
Quick Lane is a enterprise acceleration program for small- and medium-sized enterprises (below 500 staff) which are going through technical, effectivity or development challenges. A part of Innovation Guelph’s Speedway™ program, it’s designed for firms incomes revenues of $1 million or extra, and gives as much as $5,000 in providers to assist these companies scale-up their operations. #IGFastLane
Since launching Quick Lane in October 2014, Innovation Guelph has labored with dozens of firms based mostly in Guelph, Kitchener-Waterloo, Hamilton and the Higher Toronto Space from quite a lot of sectors together with: Superior Manufacturing, Agri-Know-how, Meals & Beverage, Cleantech, Life Sciences in addition to Digital Media and Know-how.
Keen on coming into the Quick Lane? Be taught extra about this system right here or contact Innovation Guelph for extra data at 519.265.4495 or data@innovationguelph.ca. We stay up for working with you and serving to your organization develop to its full potential.
Writer: Story and photograph by Stacey Curry Gunn. Stacey is a Guelph-based PR and advertising and marketing communications skilled who helps companies develop by sharing their tales. Observe her on Twitter @StaceyCurryGunn.
First revealed: On-line at http://www.innovationguelph.ca/client-successes/speedway-fast-lane-stories-greenbug-energy-inc/
